CANADIAN ROCK’S LOST YEARS
New book fills in the early gaps
One summer day in the mid1980s, Randy Ray and fellow freelance journalist/writer Mark Kearney, co-authors of a series of successful Canadian trivia books, were sitting around the latter’s Ontario cottage. Inspired by a where-are-they-now column in Rolling Stone, they decided to do something similar for Canada’s neglected early rockers. The result was an interview feature series, encompassing nearly 150 artists, that ran regularly for four years in seven newspapers across Canada.
Fast-forward to 2014, and the pair decided it was time to gather those pre-digital pieces under one roof, lest they end up in the same limbo as many of their subjects.
“It took a little bit of updating and adjusting,” Ray said on the phone from his Ottawa home, but the self-published monument to their idea is now with us in the form of As the Years Go By: Conversations With Canada’s Folk, Pop and Rock Pioneers (The Trivia Guys, 480 pages). Shoestring production values notwithstanding, it’s a very welcome corrective to a gap in our country’s pop-culture history accounts.
Ray says the aim was to bring back readers’ memories of “dancing under the basketball nets in the high school gym, watching bands in church basements, hearing songs on transistors and on your car radio.”
In that sense, they succeed: if you were in range of a Canadian radio signal or attending concerts any time from the late 1950s through the mid-1980s, you’re likely to be amazed at how many dormant memories get stirred by this book. But it is also a work of deep, nay, fanatical scholarship, all the more impressive for having been carried out largely pre-internet.
When Ray and Kearney tracked down their often elusive subjects, they talked about things that happened anywhere from five to 35 years earlier. Thus, the new book is effectively a nostalgic take on what was already nostalgia 30 years ago.
What might have been a handicap, though, is a strength: the twice-removed quality adds a layer of poignancy to the whole project, making it more than just a reference book. Artists whose legacies are down to the memories of those who were there, and to a blurry YouTube clip or two, are now placed for posterity in their proper historical continuum. You yearn for a time machine to go back and catch the Haunted and the Rabble — Montreal bands that, from surviving accounts, appear to have anticipated the Ramones by a good 10 years.
“Canadian music was a very interconnected community in those days,” Ray said, and that is reflected in the book. Future stars — Bruce Cockburn, David Foster — are seen lurking unassumingly in nascent bands. Others keep popping up in varied settings: Domenic Troiano (Mandala, the James Gang, the Guess Who, producer for soul singer Shawne Jackson) must not have slept for at least 10 years.
There are times, too, when you find yourself asking: Why isn’t this person a 24-carat legend? Consider R. Dean Taylor. Remembered mostly for the 1970 outlaw ballad Indiana Wants Me, the singer-songwriter achieved the considerable coup for a white Canadian of getting signed to Motown, where he landed a cowriting credit on Diana Ross and the Supremes’ immortal Love Child. “He was one of the hardest to track down,” said Ray, and it shows: his quotes are limited to a few words about how he doesn’t want to talk.
CanCon — the early-1970s federal government regulation that decreed a percentage of radio programming be homegrown — marked a sea change for Canadian music, effectively creating the foundation for a viable national industry. Memorable one-shots abound from this era: Motherlode’s When I Die, the Bells’ mildly controversial boudoir ballad Stay Awhile, Skylark’s Wildflower, A Foot in Coldwater’s Make Me Do Anything You Want and the song that gives the book its title, Mashmakhan’s glorious prog-pop stormer As the Years Go By, one of the first Montreal records to go global. (The next time you’re in a room with Japanese people of a certain age, ask them about that song. There’s a good chance they know it.)
But it was a mixed blessing: the overnight demand for product brought its share of rogue agents rushing in to fill the void. A special nod here goes to Gary and Dave, soft-rock merchants who approached their career in music with all the passion of hedge fund managers.
Scattered hits aside, an undeniably melancholy thread runs through the book. A few tales of thwarted hopes and industry malfeasance are one thing; dozens of them gathered in one place, with musicians talking of hoped-for comebacks that never materialized, begin to take on the shape of a national narrative.
Some of these stories (Bob McBride of Lighthouse springs to mind) are almost unbearably sad; most are more in the category of little victories and bigger disappointments. It’s hard not to discern a certain defensiveness when Rich Dodson of the Stampeders, his last hit fading in the rear-view mirror, says: “Being in arenas and all that stuff doesn’t excite me anymore.”
In the hard-luck hall of fame, a special plaque should be erected to the band (I’ll leave them unnamed here) whose roadie contrived to crash their van into a swamp, consigning all their equipment to a soggy death and effectively ending their career.
The book’s mid-’80s cutoff point is loosely tied to the perceived moment when the Canadian music industry came of age and people like Bryan Adams and Corey Hart could go mega without years of soul-crushing dues-paying. In Montreal terms, that means we get Pagliaro but not Jean Leloup, Harmonium but not Voivod, Patsy Gallant but not Mitsou, Offenbach but not Men Without Hats.
But you have to stop somewhere, and besides, the boom years are covered forensically in Michael Barclay’s indispensable brick Have Not Been the Same: The Canrock Renaissance 1985-1995. Now, thanks to a pair of indefatigable lifers, we have a book that makes a very good start at filling in the earlier picture.